At some point between his 2001 album, “No More Shall We Part,” and his 2003 album, “Nocturama,” Nick Cave realized that he could be genuinely funny. This recognition has pushed his music into the sublime. Yes, Mr. Cave’s peculiar brand of brimstone and treacle post-punk blues certainly earned him an esteemed spot in rock history thanks to his late-’70s and early-’80s band, the Birthday Party, and his 11 albums with the Bad Seeds.

But it wasn’t until “Babe, I’m on Fire,” the very last song on “Nocturama,” that Mr. Cave really injected his sardonic sense of humor into his songs about excess, religion, and sin. “Babe, I’m on Fire” was essentially Mr. Cave’s 14-minute list of just who was on fire — including everybody from Bill Gates to the band members to the blind referee and the unlucky amputee — recited over a stumbling racket that made the song sound like it was sung by a Pentecostal preacher stuck in an absurdist play. Through that one song, Mr. Cave found a way to add wrinkles to his already formidable music, and the slight shift has enabled the Australia-born, London-based musician and writer to craft some of the finest albums of his career as he enters middle age.

Now, on the heels of 2004’s “Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus,” a brash, soulful tumble through his usual foibles spiked with his newfound deadpan comic timing, and last year’s Grinderman album, which rumbled through ornery, youthful garage rock with gimlet-eyed cynicism, comes “Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!,” Mr. Cave’s 14th solo album and the finest of his storied career.

Everything about the album feels like a potential cheeky joke, from the cover art to the hyperbolic exclamation points in the title, to the album’s thematic riffs on the biblical story of Lazarus, the man raised from the dead. Mr. Cave examines the story from Lazarus’s point of view in the album’s opening, titular track. Against the sardonic backing chants of “Dig yourself, Laz’rus,” Mr. Cave sings a meandering song about “Larry,” who “grew increasingly neurotic and obscene / I mean he, he never asked to be raised from the tomb.”

Mr. Cave’s take on the story is comically morbid, as poor Larry spends the song trying to get back in his hole but ends up “like so many of them do, back on the streets of New York City / In a soup queue, a dope fiend, a slave, then prison, then the madhouse, then the grave.” It’s Mr. Cave’s version of zombie rock, and the entire album charts life as a long purgatory, stuck between the living and the dead.

Mr. Cave’s usual suspects appear — sex, loss, remorse, addiction, religion, etc. — but he comes at them with a different stylistic filter, like an author derisively commenting on his own style. In “We Call Upon the Author,” Mr. Cave runs through a series of his own writerly verses — “Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose / And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code” — and each finishes with the self-deprecating “And we call upon the author to explain” before the punch line arrives on the bridge with a cry of “Prolix, prolix, nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix.”

Nearly every one of Mr. Cave’s apocalyptic lyrical proclamations gets qualified by a later line, undercutting its doomsday tenor and fragmenting its meaning like a prism. It makes for fascinating songwriting: “Night of the Lotus Eaters” explores a human limbo between reality and something else, something from which people should shield themselves. The song, sculpted from a haunting bass line and textures of violin and guitar that strafe the song’s background like flashes of faraway lightning, is a familiar Cave horror landscape — until the narrator admits, “I like floating here, it’s nice, they’ve hung seaweed around my hips / And I do the hula for the hungry ones and the lames all throw me tips.”

It’s not exactly a comforting counsel, but it is the sort of sharp left turn that prevents the album from becoming yet more chthonic fare for the Bad Seeds — though the band is certainly in top form here. From the jagged guitar thrusts of “Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!” to the thundering garage tumult of “Albert Goes West” — cheekily spiced with doo-wop-like “oohoohs” in the background — to the bleary last-call vibe of “Midnight Man,” Mr. Cave’s new album is the stem-to-stern work of a 50-year-old songwriter only now hitting his creative peak.

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Josh Grier, the chief songwriter for the Minneapolis-based band Tapes ‘N Tapes, still has his whole career ahead of him, but he’s off to a pretty good start. The group’s sophomore release, “Walk It Off,” finds Mr. Grier expanding the textbook indie rock he unleashed on the quartet’s first album, 2005’s “The Loon,” on which the Pavement and Wire influences were easily apparent. With “Walk It Off,” Mr. Grier shows that he’s also heard a great deal of the Pop Group and early XTC, but what’s most noticeable is how comfortable he sounds in so many diverse song settings.

From the fuzzy lullaby “Headshock” to the jangle folk of “Say Back Something” and the jittery post-punk funk of “Hang Them All,” Mr. Grier’s voice and melodies always feel confident and at ease.

His chameleon gifts are what make “Walk It Off” such a delight. The production is bigger and beefier, giving every track a little extra punch. Tapes ‘N Tapes propels its oblique melodies with driving bass and drums, with Mr. Grier’s ramshackle songwriting steering his group’s malleable strengths into airy new-wave sounds (“George Michael”), trebly, ska-inflected pop (“Conquest”), and anxious rock (“Le Ruse”).

Standout track “The Dirty Dirty” starts off with a heavy bass-and-drums rumble that splinters into a serrated guitar line and Mr. Grier’s laconic voice. A barrage of laser-like tones crashes over the vocals on the chorus, burying Mr. Grier’s already mumbled lyrics beneath a noisy patina, and the song continues on this enigmatically rocking tack for five wonderfully noisy minutes.

Soon enough, Mr. Grier is going to figure out what imprint he wants to put on indie rock, but until then his updating of the so-called classics is working out just fine.